In its first month, the administration of President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of opening moves that have defied constitutional laws and norms and sparked critical questions. What are the limits of executive power? Where is Congressional oversight? How did we get here?
Faculty from the University of Michigan offered their expertise on these issues at a “teach-in” panel at Angell Hall this month. The aim was to help students understand how recent policy changes have been made and, in the words of organizer Josh Pasek, “why those processes matter for whether or not we remain a democracy.”
So how did we get to this point?
This is the first of two posts that will answer this question.
Teach-in presentations by political scientists Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey gave complimentary accounts: Speaking on American public opinion, Hutchings shared the key insight that U.S. election outcomes often hinge on attitudes toward salient social groups, and, especially, Black Americans.
Mickey’s talk, the subject of our forthcoming post (Part 2), focused on the story of party elites, and the evolution of the Republican Party “from the mainstream, conservative party committed to democracy, into something different.”
The Racial Divide
Decades of research on American public opinion may help us to understand the results of this election and others, Hutchings said, by correcting a common assumption that Americans pay attention to politics and cast votes based on ideology and policies.
“American voters are woefully uninformed about politics,” Hutchings said. Only about 20% of voters are familiar with the ideological terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and a significant minority – maybe even a majority, depending on how you count– don’t know which party is the more conservative party. “You might think that is hyperbole,” said Hutchings. “I assure you, it is not.”
The perspective they do employ, said Hutchings, is one that focuses on “salient social groups.”
(Of note, the American National Election Studies, which has surveyed voters in every election since 1948, is a leading source of what we know about the U.S. electorate; Hutchings was a former principal investigator on the project.)
Politicians play to grievances, fears, and stereotypes, leveraging divisions based on race, religion, gender, and sexuality to build coalitions.
“Perhaps the most salient social group– certainly the most persistent and consistent in terms of its political impact– has been racial groups: In particular, attitudes about Black Americans,” said Hutchings. “It is, after all, the issue around which we had the bloodiest war in American history, the Civil War. It’s the group around which we had the largest social movement in the 20th century: The Civil Rights Movement. And it’s the issue around which we had the largest social movement of the 21st century: Black Lives Matter.”
“The racial divide is the biggest divide in American politics,” said Hutchings. It is the foundation of our current party system that, since the 1960s, has pitted one party that was “mostly the champion of civil rights, sometimes reluctantly,” against the party that was not.
“I’m not here to make a moral claim,” said Hutchings, “but I am here to make a factual claim that race is the chief dividing point in American politics. …If we want to get a sense of how we arrived at this point we’re at now in our political collective lives, we can’t ignore race.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
To win future elections, Democrats would need to mobilize non-white voters without alienating white voters, while Republicans will confront the “diminishing number of angry white men,” said Hutchings. We can expect politicians to continue to prey on social divisions in the electorate: “They’re going to keep doing it as long as you keep responding to it,” he said.
Vincent Hutchings is the Hanes Walton Jr. Collegiate Professor in Political Science and Afroamerican and African Studies. Robert Mickey is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. Mickey, Hutchings, and Pasek are all affiliated with the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research.
This post is part of a series that focuses on the 2025 teach-in held at Angell Hall that also marked the 60th anniversary of the first teach-in convened in the United States, held at the University of Michigan during the Vietnam War protests of 1965. Recordings of the talks are available on YouTube.
This post was written by Tevah Platt of the Center for Political Studies, with contributions from Vincent Hutchings and Robert Mickey.
